[ESS] Avoiding printing large R objects

[Rodney Sparapani]

>The way I most frequently cause an undesired termination of my emacs/ESS/R
>session is by accidentally printing a very big object. ESS seems to get
>quite unhappy, presumably trying to keep up with the colour highlighting
>etc. I usually kill the processes (R and xemacs) manually. I suppose I
>could alter R code for print method functions so that they refuse to print
>oversized things (though I'm not sure how I'd measure size), or have
>.Rprofile always keep an appropriate personal version of print() in my
>global environment (or get better at remembering to use invisible() and
>str()), but is there a standard ESS solution to this, or could someone
>propose a better one?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Dan
>
>ESS 5.2.3 in xemacs in debian (testing) linux 2.6.6
>
>in R:
>  
>
>>version
>>    
>>
>         _                
>platform i386-pc-linux-gnu
>arch     i386             
>os       linux-gnu        
>system   i386, linux-gnu  
>status                    
>major    2                
>minor    0.0              
>year     2004             
>month    10               
>day      04               
>language R
>
>  
>
Dan:

You don't say too much about your xemacs setup so I can't be sure.  I 
switched to
lazy-lock a couple of years ago (when it started working again with 
current xemacs/ESS).
I do this occasionally and I haven't noticed any problems.  I guess it 
all depends on your
definition of "very big".

Rodney